Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana and candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, said Sunday that when he was young, he “would have done anything to not be gay.”
“When I was younger, I would have done anything to not be gay,” Buttigieg told attendees of a fundraiser for the LGBTQ Victory Fund on Sunday evening, according to the Washington Blade.
“When I began to halfway realize what it meant that I felt the way I did about people I saw in the hallway at school or the dining hall at college, it launched in me something that I can only describe as a kind of war. And if that war had been settled on the terms that I would have wished for when I was 15, or 20, or frankly even 25, I would not be standing here.”
The mayor continued, “if you had offered me a pill to make me straight, I would have swallowed it before you had time to get me a sip of water. It’s a hard thing to think about now. It’s hard to face the truth that there were times in my life where if you had shown me exactly what it was inside me that made me gay, I would have cut it out with a knife.”
He added, “thank God there was no pill. Thank God there was no knife,” or “the best thing in my life, my marriage, might not have happened at all.”
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